Category: CBA

From vol 38|39 (December 2017) of CBA, we are going to add a selection of text pieces to the international art comics anthology, and we want YOU to contribute material.

You heard right. From being a full-blooded comics anthology, we are turning CBA into more of a magazine and we need your help!

What we want: We’re basically looking for text pieces that match the comics by relating to the theme (interpreted freely), or to the international experimental comics scene, or just avant-garde stuff in general that you think might fit into what we’re doing in CBA. It can be an article, interview, statement about comics or just some artistic, experimental, poetic text about pretty much anything!

Theme: FRAGMENTS OF PAST TIMEMain editor for this volume: Christina Cromnow Description: The past can be found in the form of small parts inside your body. Some parts are impossible to get rid of. Maybe they’re important, maybe they’re not. But they do exist for a reason. What is your reason?
Even though your past time is out of reach, there is always the possibility of deciding how it will look in front of other people. What would your fragments look like if you showed them in public?

Unfortunately we cannot offer you any payment for participating. If we publish your submission you will receive 10 free copies of the issue (this is the same deal as for the comics we publish and we also don’t get paid for the editorial work. We wish it was different, but it’s the situation). Naturally, copyright for your material will stay in your hands and we do accept material that has already been published elsewhere. That’s all we can offer at this date. We hope that you will find being in CBA an enjoyable experience. You would be in the company of some great comic creators.

(And don’t worry, CBA is still going to be mostly comics, we haven’t gone completely crazy…)

I don’t want to dream is a comic of 43 pages, entirely painted in oil, by Greek artist Spyros Verykios. It is a metaphysical horror story about how an experiment with mind-expanding drugs has unexpected consequences – or is it something else entirely? The borders between what is dream, reality and bedtime story are blurred sometimes.

In this very special exhibition, we will show a selection of the original paintings from this comic. There will also be some unrelated bonus material included, such as the originals from another of Verykios’ stories, published back in CBA vol 7.

Let’s plunge together into the pits of madness. Let’s watch the dissolution of reality, let’s dance with clear heads and see where it takes us. Let’s travel the river hiding in the desert sands until the wind rises and we reach the final collapse. Let’s look deep into the eye of the tiger. And see afterwards if we dare to dream.

The exhibition opening is also the release party (or as we like to say, R’lyehsfest) for the new CBA vol 36|37 (pre-order it here) where I don’t want to dream is included, along with three other stories, by Akab [IT], Elena Guidolin [IT] and Serena Schinaia [IT]. Cover by Radovan Popović [RS]. The theme for this volume is In the pits of madness.

Here are some samples from the exhibition (and you can find more from the book at our Instagram):

We are happy to announce that even though we didn’t reach the goal we had set on Indiegogo, we still managed to cover almost the entire printing cost for CBA vol 36|37. It helped a lot that we found a new, cheaper printing house and that we got some big donations in the last days of the campaign. There are still some issues such as rent and distribution costs, but those are later concerns.

We’ve had some questions as to the story behind our decision to try crowdfunding for the new volume (by the way, please help fund us!). Why we lost the magazine support (“Kulturtidskriftstöd”) from the Arts Council. So here’s the story:

The previous CBK crew (ca 2012-2014) had this idea of publishing every other volume of CBA as a stand-alone graphic novel with one creator doing the entire book. The first one was CBA vol 23: All Saints by Marcel Ruiters, published in 2013.

In November of 2014, that crew didn’t work anymore for various reasons, and more or less decided to shut down CBK. One of the crew members who didn’t want it to die went to the comics school to invite anyone from there who would be interested in taking over to come to a meeting. They also made a general invitation/call for help. So a bunch of people from the school and some others (like one of the original founders who had left a few years previously) came to this crisis meeting.

Because of the abrupt end to the former crew, they left some loose ends for the new one to tidy up. One of those were the publication of the last few graphic novel volumes (vol 29, 31 and 33, the last one of which came out in 2016).

The thing is that CBA had had this “kulturtidskriftstöd” since 2005(?), and when we applied again for 2016, we got rejected. The explanation was that CBA had turned into something that was less of a magazine, and they thought we should apply for litterature support instead, for the separate issues as separate books.

So we tried that, but with no success. Another problem is that the litterature support is applied after the fact, so you still need to have the money for printing etc before hand. So we really wanted to get the “kulturtidskriftstöd” back. After a meeting with a representative for the Arts Council, we thought we had understood what to do to get it back; we stopped with the graphic novel volumes and returned to a pure anthology like it was before, with 4 issues/year.

We thought that it’d be a one year step back, but that now we had made amends and solved the problem. But no. Another rejection. This time because we were “too much of an anthology and not enough of a magazine”. Which was kind of a shock since the difference between now and all those years when we got the support was negligible.

We will make another try in the application for 2018, to add more text material that’s relevant to the subjects we’re working with, and to the comics scene that we’re a part of. It’s an ongoing process and a balance between what we want to do and what our readers want and what might give us money, and we may end up in some other direction along the way. We’ll stay true to our ideals while trying to adapt and then we’ll see what works out.

And in the meantime we still need to finance this year’s publications (and rent, somehow), so now we’re trying out crowdfunding as an alternative.

So now you know a bit more about the current situation, along with some hints of where we might be going in the futurte. If you want to be part of the crowdfunding, go to the Indiegogo campaign page.

And if you want to help but don’t like the Indiegogo platform, you can also give us money via PayPal instead: info [@] cbkcomics [.] comor meet us live, for example this weekend at Seriefest (or the official party Seriefestfesten at Hybriden on Saturday).

CBA has been around for a long time, publishing lots of great stories that move far outside of the commercial mainstream of comics.

For our upcoming volume, you can be a part of making it possible! We want to make this issue as awesome as humanly possible and that is why we need your funding (and also because we just lost the funding we’ve been relying on for many years).

We’re looking for donations to cover the costs of printing and distribution (and if we get some extra we might even be able to pay the rent) for the upoming CBA vol 36: In the pits of madness, featuring comics by Spyros Verykios, Akab, Elena Guidolin and Serena Schinaia, with a cover by Radovan Popović, edited by Mattias Elftorp.

Check out this promotional video, by Víctor Expolio, with music by Feberdröm and art from the book:

Horror meets madness and the inevitable collapse in this new volume of CBA, beautifully drawn and painted in heavy brush strokes and oil paint and sharp lines and halftones.

Let’s plunge together into the pits of madness. Let’s watch the dissolution of reality, let’s dance with clear heads and see where it takes us. Let’s travel the river hiding in the desert sands until the wind rises and we reach the final collapse. Let’s look deep into the eye of the tiger. And see afterwards if we dare to dream.

Some of the perks for donations (go to the campaign page for all the details):